CEO.CA Chairman's Briefing

The day after my first interview with the Unknown Geologist, we had another one. This second one was 60 minutes and it was full of information on the Goldboro project, which he worked on in the 1980s. He has not forgotten about it since. Read on to find out why. 

Newton: Thanks very much joining us again, Dave. What a treat yesterday.

Unknown Geologist: It’s always a pleasure.

Newton: Completely blown away by the things you had to say.

Unknown Geologist: Well, thank you. It's nice to know that somebody is listening.

Newton: I had no idea about the Goldboro property. To hear some of your experience was great, too. Have you done all your geological work within in Nova Scotia?

Unknown Geologist: Yes. It was a short period of time, about five years. Three of them with Orex and two with Seabright Resources at Forest Hill underground. I also did a couple short summer jobs when I graduated from university at St. Francis Xavier University in 1985.

Newton: Thanks for letting us have it there yesterday. I was wondering if you'd be out of practice or not, but you seemed to take right to it.

Unknown Geologist: I've always had an interest in geology. If it was a stable work environment, I would still be doing geology work today. I enjoyed that job but I made a career change to Software Engineering years ago. It's been a successful career but would rather be doing geology related work.

Newton: Do you have a favorite project in Nova Scotia?

Unknown Geologist: Goldboro is my favourite project. By a long shot. I’ve had a general interest in gold for many years and often said, “Why isn’t anybody mining at Goldboro?” I have been beating the table on that one for years. Finally, someone was smart enough to take this Goldoro project. Anaconda has it now and I hope they quickly move it to production.

It's all about who we have at the helm. I think the current management at Anaconda with both Dustin Angelo and Jonathan Fitzgerald are great. They are really moving this along. The innovative ideas and mining record they have at Anaconda are just great for Goldboro. It's an interesting group of people to have jump into this project.

Newton: Have you followed them very closely? Are you aware of some of the stuff they're doing?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, I have. When I first heard about the deal in the press release, I was quite intrigued by what Anaconda has done to this point -- selling waste rock blew me away. It's an innovative way to make money. At the same time, I was surprised by the share price. How can it only be 6 cents for a share in a gold producer? They're paying the bills and have a lot of interesting prospects, too. They're drilling and finding new deposits. I think they were smart to pick up Goldboro. It secures the future for them. They do have some good prospects in the areas, but they are lower grade. Goldboro may well surprise a few people. The markets will appreciate that when they start bringing producing gold from Goldboro. The material that is 5+ grams per tonne will double or triple their current output.

Newton: Let alone some of that high-grade underground material.

Unknown Geologist: Once they get into that, it’s a little more expensive to go underground. The grades underground are very exciting of course. The pending PEA will spell out the underground economics. I am not worried about that there will be plenty of high grade underground material to mine for years to come.

Newton: We could talk for hours just about Anaconda, Mr. Unknown Geologist. I've been very impressed by them.

Let's talk about these high-grade veins. You described the geometry and size of it a bit, and the mineralized zones at Goldboro seemed very large.

Unknown Geologist: The mineralized zones at Goldboro are some of the largest that I have seen in the province. It is not too often that you get a 2-3 meter wide zone at these high-grade narrow-vein type deposits we have here in Nova Scotia. However Goldboro is about to change all of that. When I first went underground at Goldboro back in 1988, I saw what was referred to as the 1-2-3 belt on the 250 foot-level in the ramp. Together, they were in the vicinity of 10 meters wide on one limb and both limbs of the anticline are mineralized at Goldboro. I've never seen anything like that anywhere else in Nova Scotia. The Boston-Richardson is 8 meters thick on the 400-foot level in the rehabilitated Boston-Richardson shaft, which are fantastic widths not normally observed anywhere in the Nova Scotia goldfields!

This is an interesting deposit. The size of it is vast. And the wider zones have the continuity. They appear at surface -- everything comes to surface. The deposit plunges 25 degrees to the east, so any hot spot that you drill underground should be able to trace back to a surface location. If you want to do multiple pits on high grade, then you'll have multiple targets. The beast is a miners dream.

Newton: It doesn't look like it's too broken up.

Unknown Geologist: No, not at all. It’s pretty good, very few faults and the rock is excellent for underground mining – very sound, structurally.

Newton: And the reason for your comment that "everything comes to surface" is because of this big anticline structure. It was great to hear when you described how Osisko put in some holes that were too far away from the anticline to tell the real story in Dolliver Mountain areas.

Unknown Geologist: Oh yeah. The Dolliver Mountain holes... I was on the Board of Directors of Orex Exploration at the time and we brought Osisko in on a deal where they were looking for something they could mine as a big open-pit with 100-meter widths at somewhere around one gram/tonne of gold. Their comparison was their deposit that they were mining in the Malartic at the time.

Osisko did a lot of drilling. They did some exploration holes in the Dolliver Mountain area and, unfortunately, the only information we had was historic in nature which shows some very thick belts out in that area. There's no outcrop at all to go off and there is 25 feet of overburden at surface on the property, which covered it from most prospectors over the years. I am grateful for that because it means it's still there today.

Other's misfortunes can benefit you in mining. When Osisko drilled these holes at Dolliver Mountain -- 5 holes spaced 200 meters apart, just classic exploration holes -- I recall that there was some confusion about a shaft they were using as a marker. They thought it was the original shaft on the anticline, but it was actually a ventilation shaft located about 200 meters to the north. Unfortunately, they lined up the 5 hole and did not hit any belt material. Lucky for Anaconda, they get to explore this area that once hosted the largest stamp mill in Nova Scotia.

In hindsight, it looks like a simple enough mistake. I actually went down and saw some of the drill core that was drilled. I looked at one hole and it was all greywacke, which meant that they didn't hit any of the belt material. All that was published in news releases at the time with Orex. You can understand that I was frustrated by some of this.

There are some old Fairbault maps of the Dolliver Mountain area. They show some very think belts in this area which we still know very little about. A big positive for Anaconda.

Newton: Best outcome from our conversations here is that we prevent that from happening again.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, indeed. I have talked with the Anaconda team about this. There are very easy ways to recognize where you are on the anticline just by looking exsolution cleavage angles in the core. I won’t bore you with this technical stuff, but it is invaluable to know where you are when drilling the structure. This info will greatly help Anaconda in their future work.

Newton: Any comments on geophysics or other sampling programs used out here?

Unknown Geologist: There was some geophysics done in the past, I believe. Some IP was done before Orex got involved, which is going back a ways. There was some historical stuff done by the Department of Mines and Energy, but not a lot of soil sampling or things like that. Anaconda produced a nice geophysics diagram in one of their recent PRs. It shows that the anticline is hot from East Goldbrook all the way out to Dolliver Mountain.

Newton: Yes, I remember that from first conversation. You mentioned a till sample with 6 grams per tonne, saying it was found about a half kilometer away from Goldboro.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, that is an interesting place Meadow Lake. You have East Goldbrook, Boston-Richardson, West Goldbrook, and Dolliver Mountain. If you keep going, then there's a lake called Meadow Lake. Just to the south of this lake is where Seabright Resouces reported a till sample at over 6g/t. Believe it or not, that was back in 1986 when I first started at Seabright Resources.

I had just been sent into the field and they said, “You need to learn how to recognize glacial till and take a proper till sample. Let's get in there.” We took one till sample and we ran into the Meadow Lake where we had lunch. I couldn't sit down because I was going to look for quartz. I saw a piece of quartz on the shore of the lake and I said, “Oh, there's a big chunk of gold in here” and it was as big as your fingernail. Of course, I brought it to the project geologist and he said, “No that’s not gold.” And I said, “Oh, I think so.” And he took his knife out and stuck it in. He said, “Oh my God, you never find gold in the field.” I said, “I guess it’s my lucky day.” Seabright quickly staked 80 more claims around the lake. I panned gold on the shore of that lake and you could get gold in every pan. Along the road leading into it, you could get gold as well. There is gold there, but it's an extension. Nobody has figured out where that is coming from yet, as far as I know.

Newton: Do you know if it's all staked up there now?

Unknown Geologist: I'm sure it is, yes. I haven't confirmed it, but I would expect it to be.

Newton: Thanks. And speaking of extensions, is there any reason to think that gold at Meadow Lake could be geologically related to the Goldboro deposit?

Unknown Geologist: I know back a number of years ago that a company called Acadia Mining had the claims immediately to the east of East Goldbrook, which is headed the other way on the same anticline as East Goldbrook. There is hot stuff on the Anaconda property that extends off the property in that direction. I believe Acadia Mines did some drilling there with three or four holes. One hole hit 10 grams over 3 meters, which was great because that is the same anticline as East Goldboro. Keep in mind that is a good kilometer off the Anaconda property.

I would say that it is one of the hottest prospects that there is from one end to the other. It’s impressive.

Newton: I'm looking at a map here and I see Country Harbour. It looks like there's a fault kind of running along that harbor in this map.

Unknown Geologist: As I was saying last time, Nova Scotia has a lot of parallel faults associated with when the African plate hit the North American plate. I was talking about this last time, a bit.

These faults are present at Isaac Harbour, Wine Harbour, Country Harbour, and even Halifax Harbour. You can see on a map how they are parallel to each other, perpendicular to the coast.

Some of these harbours are associated with deep crust cracks that provided a way for gold-bearing fluids to come into the rock, but some of them aren't. Some people certainly have drilled these fault zones and not found any gold.

Newton: Neat to hear that about Halifax Harbour. It looks like the Country Harbour is one of the largest along the coast between itself and Halifax Harbour.

Unknown Geologist: Yes. I used to do some hunting up on the hill at the Country Harbour, overlooking the harbour. There are actually some small mines up there. I’ve seen old tailings piles out there.

Newton: Are they common around there?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, it's probably fair to say that there's gold everywhere in the province. At least in a triangle that runs from the block of rock from Canso all the way to Yarmouth.

Newton: Is that the Goldenville formation?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, that is the Goldenville formation. There is some gold in the Halifax formation, but the majority of the historic gold is in the Goldenville. There are some known occurrences in the Halifax formation.

Newton: Early Cambrian.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, Cambiran Protorezoic -- somewhere in there, I believe.

Newton: Well, thank you for the discussion here. I wonder, is there anybody else that you really know and respect in the world of Nova Scotia geology?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, there certainly are. One gentleman named Ken Adams the geologist at Forest Hill and he taught me a lot. It was funny, as I was kind of a rookie underground mine geologist.

One day he said, “After three more blasts we're going to be in the gold.” We were mining the vein that they actually named after him, the Adams vein at Forest Hill, and asked “How do you know that?” Well, he showed me how he figured it all out. Where the bottom of ore shoot is, where the top is, how long you’re getting the gold, and so on.

Nova Scotia gold is pretty unique in the sense that it's not disseminated. It forms in some quartz veins, which look the same as the others but just happen to get gold precipitated in them. This gold is described by what's called a ribbon theory. Even the old timers had a good sense for why the ore shoots exist and how to predict where the other ones are.

There was a lot of that work going on at Forest Hill and I took some of that knowledge to Goldboro. It took at least three or four weeks to just go through everything to go through color coding things figure with visible gold, aresenopyrite concentrations, and much more to see if anything stands out. Of course, something always stood out. And, magically, the highlighted ore shoot in the historic Richardson mine lined up nicely with some hot stuff from the one, two, and three belts of Goldboro. It’s quite neat.

That information and knowledge is still out there and I think it can help Anaconda at the project. That information may take it to the next level for them.

Newton: A couple questions about that for you. Do you still have any copies of that information yourself?

Unknown Geologist: No, I don’t. Everything I had before we shutdown around 1990-91 was sent to the Jacques Levesque's office in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec.

I was up there for a board meeting a few years back and went into the office. He still had the majority of this type of work there in a storage area with extensive historical information. That particular piece of work I did was there -- it was on pen and paper from many years ago. There was a bunch of other stuff, too. Some of my models lined up well with the models we have today.

Newton: And you were doing that with pen and paper back in 1980s?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, back in the late 1980s. That’s the way we did it, without any computers.

Newton: How much mining has there been since then?

Unknown Geologist: There were a few small mines in the area. There was actually one at East Goldbrook. It was typical narrow vein stuff, although there are actually several different types of vein deposits in Guysborough. Another type of deposit are the large belts where a pile of quartz veins are smashed into an argillite unit.

Mining at East Goldbrook focused on the typical narrow vein mines. I've seen some of the samples from there and they were in the 15 centimeter range.

Newton: I believe you mentioned mapping -- how much of the deposit area or which deposits were you mapping at that time?

Unknown Geologist: Well, Peter, the only mapping I really did at Goldboro was in the underground decline.

Back in 1988, Onitap spent about $9 million in rehabilitating the Boston Richardson shaft with the goal of linking up the decline ramp that Orex was putting in with their $9 million. Together, they spent $18 million dollars over a few years. Their goal was to join up the ramp that was supposed to go to 400 feet with the bus in Richardson shaft which was currently at 400 to help mine the thing underground.

Unfortunately, when Onitap was rehabilitating the shaft, it was full of about 350 feet of garbage and refuse. Even bodies of dead horses, I believe. It had been used as a dump, unfortunately. It was very expensive to clean, but they did rehabilitate the shaft. And then never advanced it further.

Orex shut their decline ramp with two cross-cuts on 125 and 250 level, which I mapped from top to bottom. The Boston-Richardson is exposed in three locations in the ramp. There's one spot where it still runs about 5 or 6 grams over about 2 meters of thickness.

Newton: Wow. How much of the method that you used to do your modelling can be applied across the project now?

Unknown Geologist: Well, you would require a fair amount of information before you can extrapolate the location of the veins. Especially when you get to the Boston-Richardson.

Fortunately enough, between the Boston-Richardson and the First is what they call the New Belt. It is below the Boston-Richardson stratigraphically over about 150 feet. The old timers believed that it was barren arenite, which is a good marker for the property. It’s one of the only markers on the property, really. After this belt of barren arenite, there are 12+ belts. They continue one after another after another after another in East Goldbrook area. And the same in the West Goldbrook, which is older again. Dolliver Mountain has mineralized zones that would be expected to be several kilometers below the ramp.

Despite all this potential at depth, there's never been a hole drill deeper than 300 meters at this project -- far as I know. Nobody's ever poked a hole deep down to see what's there and that is fairly typical for Nova Scotia. Nobody here really looks deeper than 200 meters.

Newton: What do you think of the potential to bring some kind of a smaller rig into the historical workings underground and maybe drill out in a few different directions?

Unknown Geologist: There are a couple of interesting targets, even just in the ramp today. Keep in mind that the ramp is 30-feet wide, it's amazing to see the south limb of what they call the 1-2-3 Belt. They’re just so close together here that you could mine it all in one shot.

Going from Forest Hill to Goldboro and seeing a 30-foot wide zone of quartz was just fantastic. And the grades -- some areas had upwards of 6 grams per tonne at Goldboro. It all left me wondering -- how come nobody is mining this thing? Where is everybody? This is why I am talking to you today Peter.

There is just a huge belt that is nicely exposed. They could easily go in there and do their bulk sample. We actually did a couple of bulk samples there, which are described in the technical reports. I believe we did one with 5 tonnes and another with 6 tonnes, which ran 3 and 4 grams each.

Newton: Did you take those bulk samples from the exposed belts in the ramp?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, we took slashes off the wall on the 125 level. At the top of that level, one belt was exposed with small pieces of visible gold. We took a slash, a 1-foot slash, and I marked it up. We had the driller come in and pop off one foot along the 30 feet, which comprised roughly five tonnes. We took that to a mill in Quebec and I believe it ran at maybe 4 or 5 grams per tonne.

Newton: Wow. A slash from the wall of the ramp, neat.

Unknown Geologist: Another thing people ask about is how competent the rock is. How easy would it be to mine here? Well, it's A-1. It’s very solid. It's very competent, even in the fault zones.

Sure, you get a little bit of water but it is nothing too serious. If you crib it up and fence it off, then it can be safe. The rock is very hard, very sturdy, and very supportive.

The belts are pretty close to each other and they dip at a 70-degree angle. That is a nice angle to let you crib it up as you do your stopes and pull everything out. The stopes are pretty close there, so it's up to the mining engineers to figure out.

Newton: Neat, thanks. You asked why somebody isn't mining this, but I believe that you know why in your heart of hearts. In fact, I think you saw it first hand when you left the mining industry in the early 1990s during a tough bear market.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, the gold price did fall off there. Gold fell out of favor, but they were still mining at Forest Hill with 6 grams as a minimum. My marker for Goldboro was always 5 grams over a meter and a half, but they wouldn't have even mined that at Forest Hill!

I think the widest they mined a Forest Hill was 2 meters. Everything was 1.2 meters wide, very much narrow vein mining. They actually brought in some tin miners from England who specialized in narrow vein mining. The operation was only about 150 tonnes per day, but they were driving some pretty high-grade material through the mill. I believe it was almost half ounce material.

Newton: Can you imagine doing something like that at Goldboro today with Anaconda's Pine Cove mill? Just small scale mining at Goldboro for high-grade material. Imagine if they could mine material with 1 ounce per tonne and put it on a barge from Goldboro to Point Rousse. That would be neat.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, Peter. I think that's possible here. When I first went from Forest Hill to Goldboro, I just said "Wow.” And then we drilled it and it was even better! Goldboro has as at least as much gold at Forest Hill, but the belts are so much bigger at Goldboro. Why was nobody mining Goldboro when they are mining Forest Hill?

Forest Hill is certainly a good deposit. The high-grade gold and history are phenomenal. You have so many pits there that it has a lot of potential that it was mined from surface for a long time, but when they went underground they found some really nice stuff. It was all very narrow high-grade stuff.

Goldboro has high grade, too, but the zones are much wider. It's also much more contiguous -- the Boston-Richardson is a perfect example. It goes from surface down to 1250 and still has the grade.

There is a historical image that shows the ore shoot on the north and the south limb, which is where we started working on the theory of these ribbon models. These models are well known in Bendigo and Ballarat. We started looking at all that, mapping it all out, and things line up quite nicely. In fact, the historic maps had dashed lines on the top and bottom of the ore shoots marked on the map. This information will greatly help Anaconda

Newton: OK. How does the location of the south limb relate to the Boston-Richardson or the historical underground mining?

Unknown Geologist: If you hold a piece of paper flat with either hand and just press it together from both ends, then it will form a fold. That is kind of like what this deposit looks like.

It’s just a sedimentary deposit that's been heated up a little bit and lots of fluids have flowed into it. That is specifically the anticline. Typically, at Forest Hill, you only found gold on the north limb. At Goldboro, we're consistently finding gold on the north and south limbs.

What I like about this whole thing is that they only really mined the Boston-Richardson from 1890-1911, if I recall correctly. All by hand of course. They took the whole belt and got 5 grams. It makes for quite a long history. Keep in mind that they probably lost 15%-20% of the gold in recovery, which is still in the tailings.

The Boston is a good model. It goes from surface down to 1,250 feet in a 25-degree plunge. They highlighted an ore shoot in both limbs, but there are other belts lying below or above it stratigraphically. East Goldbrook is above the ramp. West Goldbrook and Dolliver Mountain are below it. Remember that Dolliver Mountain is about 4 kilometers to the west. So, if we drilled down 4 kilometers below the ramp then we could encounter gold that is contiguous with Dolliver Mountain.

Newton: Do you think there's really that much continuity in these structures?

Unknown Geologist: Nobody knows for sure, but I think so based on the stratigraphy. One would think that the fluids are going to come in from depth, so the gold should be found in the belts at depth but nobody knows what's below 300 meters because it has not been drilled from an underground mining perspective. As you know, Peter, that is not very deep for underground mining.

Newton: Amazing. Did you just say the belts from Dolliver Mountain could appear 4 kilometers below surface at the ramp?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, it could be so just based on the geometry. It's approximately 4 kilometers to Dolliver Mountain and the curve lies at a 25-degree plunge back towards east. It would be less thank 4 kilometers, but it would be at depth of at least 2 kilometers.

Newton: And you mentioned this 1250-foot level, which is approximately 400 meters.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, that's just an anticline.

Again, one really helpful thing to understand all of this is the Boston-Richardson mine plan. It shows the plan and cross-sectional view of what the deposit looks like. It’s very simple, just a bunch of what you call Saddle Reef deposits. The argillite unit has been injected with quartz and gold.

The harder stuff in between the arenite and the reef would be relatively barren but there's some gold in there, too.

I remember when one of the Osisko guys was looking at the core at Goldboro and I asked him, “What are you looking for?” He said, “I’ll let you know when I find it.” “Okay,” I said, “but what are you looking for?” Again, he said, “Oh, I’ll let you know when I find it.” “Okay fine ... did you find it yet?” I said. Then he said, “Yeah, I just found it. Here's a quartz belt.” Just a great moment that stuck with me.

When Osisko did this drilling, they split the core from top to bottom and sampled everything. That was a good idea, as there was a bunch of pyrrhotite in the greywacke outside the quartz belt. The pyrrhotite was running at 1-3 grams. It had no quartz. That was shocking because there is a lot of pyrrhotite in the wall rock at Goldboro but I don't think we ever sampled it.

We would only go out one meter on either side of the belt with our sampling because we were focused on gold in the quartz belts. Lo and behold, it turns out that gold-bearing pyrrhotite is a telltale sign for the Atlantic Gold’s Moose River deposit. That was an eye opener for me to the huge potential of Goldboro.

If you have a pit and you have wall rock with pyrrhotite, then you could just extend your mining plan. The belts themselves are fairly wide in spots, as I've said, but if you can add a meter or two of pyrrhotite in your wall rock then you can ad another meter of mineralized material to the pit with several grams of gold per tonne. Every tonne counts!

Newton: And that's probably completely untouched, right?

Unknown Geologist: Oh, yeah. Historical mining here was all based on visual inspection.

I read an interesting story in the mining logs from 1890 to 1910. The mine manager at the time wrote the daily log and I was reading through it -- one day he wrote that the head grade was dropping off, so he instructed all the workers to hand-cobb the quartz and throw the black rock in a pile. He hoped that would increase the grade, which is what a lot of people did historically in Nova Scotia -- cobb the quartz by hand, just the quartz.

Newton: A hard thing to do.

Unknown Geologist: They did that in this case, but the grades actually fell even further. Then, they said, “Let's throw that black rock without any quartz in there, too,” and the grade came back up.

I'm sitting there in the office reading that and I have a piece of black argillite on my desk. It had a beautiful twin crystal of arsenopyrite, so was using it as a paperweight in the office. I said, “There’s no gold in that.” I picked it up and looked closely at it with the magnifying glass -- sure enough, there was about 20 dots of gold in it. I had just picked it up because it was so beautiful with the crystal and nice flat bottom. I thought it was a good paperweight. Magically, it had gold. I still have it.

Newton: And what do people say when they see it?

Unknown Geologist: Most people think the gold is only in the quartz, historically, but the gold was in the argillite, the wall rock, and spots where you have pyrrhotite lenses.

Newton: Great to hear that you'd find it in all these different places.

Unknown Geologist: Yes, but 70% of the gold in Nova Scotia is going generally to be as gold nuggets in quartz veins. That is the typical benchmark.

The Gays River Mill which processed the Forest Hill ore back in the 80’s produced about 75% of the gold off a ‘nugget’ table. The gold came out as big corn flakes, just from shaking the ore across the table into a bucket. It was that simple.

Newton: OK. So, there is gold in the belt at surface and down dip along both sides in a north-south direction. Then, there is additional gold both above and below the belts.

Unknown Geologist: One way to think of it is like a hardcover book, where you leave the book open at an angle. Both sides form a 70 degree angle and the mineralized belts are like the chapter breaks in the book.

Newton: Do you think all of this is clear from historical drilling results?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, the model clearly shows some of these things. Again, just looking at the Boston-Richardson mine plan can help if you know what to look for.

It’s like a big horseshoe that they mined out underground. The other belt would be folded pretty much the same way. And those 70-degree limbs are perfect for stopes -- things don't get stuck at that angle and you can mine with close spacing because the stopes are vertical. The geometry is really good and it’s very competent rock for underground mining.

We never had any issues at Forest Hill. We had a couple of faults here and there, but we could crib them up. We never had any issues at all. I bet that you if you be underground at Goldboro and you water that ramp, then it will look just like it did in 1991. It has been preserved because it was filled with water.

Newton: It's exciting to think that you could just start removing mineralized material from the ramp. Especially with the fact that rock is highly competent, as you said.

In the first interview I had with Dustin back in November 2016, he described how they have some capacity in the back end of their mill. I don't know about the flow sheet there, but I gather that the capacity in their leach circuit is bigger than their crusher, so they've talked about feeding some higher grade material directly into the back end. I think they can do that with some ore from Goldboro, which is not refractory. There may be concerns around metallurgy as the gold at Goldboro is and coarse, as you've said.

Unknown Geologist: Well, it was a pretty basic mill at Gays River years ago. Of course, they had a floatation circuit and I think they had recoveries above 90% after all their processing. But they were able to get around 75% of that gold just from the shaking table. You just had to crush it to the right size, put it on the table, and +75% would come across the table. The rest went throught the Nelson concentrate, which you would then float.

I’ve talked to another gentleman that's big into mining and he said, “If the barging is economical, then all this will come up in the PEA.” Another approach would be to just table it and heap leach the rest. There are all kinds of different scenarios possible.

I certainly think that the barging option would make sense. Dustin mentioned it would cost approximately $20 per tonne to barge it with the empty barges coming back from South Carolina with the waste rock sales program. They have an empty boat coming back and it is much out of the way to stop by on Goldboro and pick it up.

Newton: The potential for heap leach there is interesting as a low cost option. Great to have that on the table.

Unknown Geologist: One gentleman told me that it may only cost $1 million to set up a heap leach at Goldboro. It's not going to be crazy expensive to do the grinding or the table, either. Then, they could be in a position to ship the concentrate from Goldboro to Point Rousses.

There are all kinds of options here and they will come out in the PEA. When Dustin first told me about the barging, I thought it sounded expensive but I started to change my mind when I heard that it would cost approximately $20 per tonne on the conference call Anaconda had before the acquisition of Orex Exploration.

That cost seemed reasonable to me. Back at Forest Hill, it was $20 per tonne to truck it 150 kilometers to the Gays river at the time. That cost would be even larger today if adjusted for inflation. Regardless, the gold price is now approximately $40 per 1 gram, so the transportation costs are about half a gram. Compared with total grades of 5-6 grams at Goldboro, there is potential for Anaconda to earn a great margin there. They potentially have a cheap way to process this ore and that will all come out in the PEA. It all makes a lot of sense to me.

Newton: Do you have a sense of what you would do if you were in their shoes?

Unknown Geologist: I am not privy to their strategy or plan, but I know that of a few spots in particular with some really high grade stuff. I still remember one piece of core that we drilled, which was about 23 meters from the surface. The overburden was about eight meters, which is pretty shallow. The rock in the core was even a bit rusty, but we hit gold-bearing quartz. It was only about a half a meter thick, but we actually glued it all back together because it was so impressive. The government geologist who looked at it from the Department of Mines and Energy said it was in the vicinity of about 11,000 grams per tonnes. I remember that one well.

Jacques Levesques kept that piece of core to show investors. I still have photos of it. The geologist at the time actually logged the core as 1% gold. You don’t often log core as a percentage of gold percentage. I have certainly never heard of that before.

There was one piece of gold that was as big as my thumbnail. There were 100s of others.

It all depends on Anaconda's strategy there. It would be great to find an area for a good sized pit and start mining there because that's cheap. You'll pay back your cost quite quickly and you’ll prove up the deposit mode. It's not possible to really understand these deposits with core drilling -- you really need to do bulk sampling or small scale mining.

And, as I mentioned the other day, Goldboro wasn't ever drilled as a high grade mine. You can pick your targets for underground mining targets and do infill drilling at those areas to prove the continuity of the belts. If that goes well, then they could probably double the size of their resource. Then, you have some money to fund drilling of a couple targets at West Goldbrook.

There are a couple of juicy targets out there at West Goldbrook. One, in particular had over 1,000 grams per tonne gold. You can simply project that back to surface based on the simple geometry of the deposits. You can poke a couple holes to try and hit it, even with holes that are just 25 meters deep at the area where it comes to surface.

Newton: Wow. And you could probably drill those shallow holes with RC, too?

Unknown Geologist: Yes, anything to keep costs down! When you hit +1,000 grams gold, you don't ignore them. At least, I didn't. I didn't forget them, either. Those results are telling you something that you have to listen to.

There have been quite a few of those type of assays at Goldboro. They are from the best parts of the ore shoot. You’re not going to have 1,000 grams every time, but you can find nice wide zones with a couple of ounces per tonne. That is what was found, historically, in the whole area at the Victoria Mine, Hurricane Mine, and the others in the local Goldboro area. There are some pretty spectacular numbers from some government work, which suggests some of those mines produced at grades well over 2 to 3 ounces per tonne gold.

Newton: Wow. I hear you saying don't ignore it and I'm with you. How could you ignore a result like that?!

Unknown Geologist: Well, there were so many of those kinds of results at Goldboro that some people ignored them. It may be hard to believe, but they never looked at it from a high-grade perspective.

Does that belt continue, does that other belt continue, what about that other belt? The models show that they continue, but there are a lot of gaps. Anaconda can find the gaps in the model and drill there to help expand the resource estimate for Goldboro. I think there is a lot of potential to use the Boston as your model for Goldboro.

That said, they could just start mining the darn thing like they did at Kirkland Lake. After they started mining there, I don’t think they stopped mining!

Newton: And the Anaconda team has done this sort of thing before with the bulk sample from Stog'er Tight. They mined a pod of higher grade material at surface and it provided a good boost to the financials.

Unknown Geologist: When I was at Goldboro blasting the ramp out, we started getting into some pretty nice looking stuff. Nobody ever asked to do any bulk sampling programs. Our focus was just to get the ramp opened up and join those two underground workings. We planned to figure out the resource later.

I actually started doing some bulk sampling there when we were blasting the ramp. Each blast took out rocks at 12 foot rounds. I sent a guy down during both the nightshift and dayshift to do five muck samples per round. He would bring the material up to surface and put it in a pile. I’d put a number on the pile and send five samples from it to the lab. If it came back at better than 2 grams, then we would use the heavy equipment to get more material from that spot. We built up a few piles of with +2 grams per tonne gold while blasting the ramp.

Newton: Do you think that pile was ever run through the mill?

Unknown Geologist: No, that one is still there. There are a bunch of other piles that were smaller because we didn't use the equipment with them.

Newton: Wow. That would seem to allow a nice bulk sample from Goldboro!

Unknown Geologist: And it could be very useful just for metallurgical testing. There is probably 15,000 metric tonnes of material sitting on surface from the ramp and approximately 3,000 of that should be +2 grams per tonne gold. All of that is from the muck samples I had the team take while we were developing the ramp.

Newton: How well-documented are those various piles at the site?

Unknown Geologist: It was well document. I had a ledger for every muck samples from that time, which was kept in Jacques Levesque office.

Newton: What were the locations of these piles?

Unknown Geologist: Right down by the head frame in the woods. It's a little bit grown in now, but it's pretty easy to see there.

Newton: That sounds about right, thank you. We are coming up on the hour mark here and I don't want to take too much of your time. Thank you for your time.

Unknown Geologist: You're welcome, Peter.

Please note that the Goldboro project is owned and operated by Anaconda Mining (TSXV:ANX).  Find more on their site here: http://anacondamining.com/ Neither the Unknown Geologist nor Peter "@Newton" Bell are associates of Anaconda Mining at the time of publication.